The ways of poetry and music are not changed anywhere without change in the most important laws of the city. So wrote Plato in the Republic (4.424c). Music, for Plato, was not a neutral amusement. It could express and encourage virtuenobility, dignity, temperance, chastity. But it could also express and encourage vicesensuality, belligerence, indiscipline.
Richard Strauss died 60 years ago this year. Not only is he one of my top ten favourite composers, he is also the one I would most like to be cast away with on an island so that I could pluck out the heart of his mystery.
May 31 was the 200th anniversary of Franz Joseph Haydn's death in 1809 at the age of 77.
The sciences aim to explain the world: they build theories that are tested through experiment, and which describe the workings of nature and the deep connections between cause and effect. Nothing like that is true of the humanities.
You can't get too far into Catholic sacred music without running into "neumes," those little square notes on four lines that look beautiful if oddly antiquated.
Singing churchmen, The Priests, have become a global musical phenomenon.
If I had a teenage child with a passion for serious music, I would not hesitate to give him or her "Essays in Musical Analysis" by Donald Francis Tovey.
Much of the world is looking to the Olympics in Beijing next month as the major 2008 landmark in Chinas relationship with the West. But for me, that landmark already came.
